Sidney Edwards Morse (1794–1871), author, editor, and inventor, was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, the second son of TJ’s correspondent Jedidiah Morse. He attended the Phillips Academy, graduated from Yale College (later Yale University) in 1811, and studied law afterward under Tapping Reeve and James Gould in Litchfield, Connecticut. During this time Morse wrote a series of essays for a Federalist Boston newspaper arguing against the admission of new southern states, which was reprinted as The New States, or a comparison of the Wealth, Strength, and Population of the Northern and Southern States (Boston, 1813). He helped establish and edited the Boston Recorder, a religious newspaper, for a little over a year before attending the Andover Theological Seminary, 1817–20. With his brother Samuel F. B. Morse, he received a patent in 1817 for a piston pump for “raising and forcing water, and other fluids.” Morse’s numerous publications included An Atlas of the United States, on an Improved Plan (New Haven, 1823), A Geographical View of Greece ([New Haven, 1825]), A Geographical, Statistical and Ethical View of the American Slaveholders’ Rebellion (1863), and Memorabilia in the life of Jedidiah Morse, D.D. (1867). Having moved to New York City in 1823, he and his brother Richard C. Morse established a Protestant newspaper, the New York Observer, which he edited until 1858. Morse developed a new method of printing maps using a printing press and published an atlas of North America and a textbook containing these “cerographs” in the 1840s. In 1866 he and his son received a patent for a bathometer for measuring sea depths. One year before his death in New York City, Morse owned real estate valued at $300,000 (DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; Dexter, Yale Biographies description begins Franklin Bowditch Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College, 1885–1912, 6 vols. description ends , 6:399–402; Litchfield Law School description begins The Litchfield Law School, 1784–1833, 1900 description ends , 16; Brigham, American Newspapers description begins Clarence S. Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690–1820, 1947, 2 vols. description ends , 1:341; General Catalogue of the Theological Seminary, Andover, Massachusetts, 1808–1908 [(1909)], 59; List of Patents description begins A List of Patents granted by the United States from April 10, 1790, to December 31, 1836, 1872 description ends , 182; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1866 [1867], 1:966; DNA: RG 29, CS, N.Y., New York, 1870; New York Herald, 24 Dec. 1871; gravestone inscription in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn).

Morse based his tables relating to the population of the united states on census data and estimates of the value of houses and lands in 1815, with most of the analysis concentrated on the 1820 census. His wide-ranging remarks on these tables included observations on the scale and direction of westward expansion; overall rate of population growth, attributable far more to natural increase than immigration; variable increases in numbers broken down by race; differences in sex ratio by region, race, and level of urbanization; geographic and racial variations in age; geographic distribution of the agricultural, commercial, and manufacturing sectors; and breakdowns by sex, age, and race of the six largest United States cities.